by Ron Hubbard
Rockecenter, kind? Oh, my Gods!
“Don’t you worry about the validity of any of this,” said Bury. “Indeed, it would be very bad for me if it were false.”
Indeed, it would be, Mr. Bury, I gritted. The identity found on a corpse gets very close scrutiny!
“Now for the money,” said Mr. Bury. And he hauled out wads of it from the left side of his briefcase. “Twenty-five thousand dollars, all in old bills, unmarked and untagged.”
Heller laid it on the side table, back of the ashtrays.
“Just one thing more,” said Bury. “It’s illegal in New York to register in a hotel under a false name. A felony, in fact.” (Oh, what a LIE!) “So I just brought up a registration blank. Sign it with your new name and put Macon, Georgia, down as the address and we’ll be finished.”
Heller took it and balanced it on his knee. “One more thing,” said Heller.
“Yes?” said Bury.
“The rest of the money in your briefcase,” said Heller.
“Oh!” said Bury, like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.
Aha, the man was also crooked. He probably had intended to keep the rest of it for himself!
“You drive a hard bargain, young man,” said Bury.
But Heller just had his palm up. Bury pulled a wad of money out of the right side of the briefcase. “It’s another twenty-five thousand,” said Bury.
Heller put it with the rest of the money, quite a pile! And then, sure as if it were his death warrant, he signed the hotel registration blank, Jerome Terrance Wister, Macon, Georgia.
Bury said, “You drive a hard bargain. But that’s not bad. You’ll really get along in the world, I can tell.”
For about ten minutes more, I said to myself. As soon as you get clear of this room, Mr. Bury, and have yourself an alibi, a bullet is going to come through that window and that will be the end of Heller! And me!
Bury stood up, “Have I got everything?” He chuckled as he showed Heller the briefcase was empty and then he put all the reclaimed I.D. and the new license plates in it, probably gloating. He carefully looked around the room. He moved over toward the door.
“One more thing,” said Heller. “Pick up that telephone and tell the clerk to go out in the street and tell that sniper on the roof to come over to this room.”
Bury went rigid. Then he grabbed for the doorknob.
It came off in his hand!
He stared at it for an instant.
Then as he dropped it, his hand darted to the inside of his coat. He was going to pull a gun!
Heller reached sideways.
He picked up a glass ashtray so fast his hand blurred.
The ashtray sizzled across the room, hit Bury a glancing blow on the arm, caromed off and shattered into a shower of glass against the door, spattering Bury.
The lawyer stepped back, arm numb. He stared at Heller.
The second ashtray was in Heller’s hand. “This one,” said Heller, “takes the top of your head off!”
Bury was shaking, he was holding his arm. He moved over to the phone. He told the clerk to go out in the street and call up to the roof across the way and tell the man there to come over quickly.
Except by the window, the room was too dark and curtained to see deeply into. Heller moved over in a leisurely fashion and took Bury’s gun.
“Just sit down there on the bed in plain view of the door. And look more relaxed.”
“I think you broke my arm.”
“Better than your head. Now, when he knocks, tell him in a normal voice to come in.”
They waited, Heller against the wall by the door.
In about five minutes there was a knock.
“Come in,” said Bury.
The door opened and a man stepped in.
Heller slammed the side of his hand against the back of the man’s neck. It catapulted him forward into Bury!
The violin case dropped.
As the man had gone by him, Heller had extracted a Cobra Colt from his waistband.
Holding two guns, Heller put the Cobra in his pocket. He stepped out, flopped the squirming sniper onto his back. The man was a thin weasel, penitentiary stamped all over his face. Heller plucked a wad of bills from his inside pocket. He riffled them.
The sniper glared at Bury. “I thought you said he was just a kid!” He was starting to get furious.
Heller stepped forward. He made a cuffing motion and the assassin flinched. And Heller had his wallet and I.D.
With his foot, Heller pulled the briefcase to him and then opened it. He took out only the car plates. “I keep my bargains, Mr. Bury. You bought some papers and you can have them. I received some in exchange and I will keep them. A deal is a deal.”
Heller moved them over off the bed and against the wall away from it. “However, Mr. Bury, I somehow doubted you were strictly a man of honor. So…”
He took the radio/cassette player out of the top of the suitcase. He hit the rewind. He pushed play. Heller’s voice came out the tiny speaker, “Come in. It’s open.” And then Mr. Bury’s voice, “I am Mr. Bury of Swindle and Crouch.” Heller spot-checked it. It was all there on the cassette.
“So,” continued Heller, “we will just put this in a safe place in case anything odd happens to me.”
“Tapes aren’t court evidence,” sneered Mr. Bury.
“So, one more thing,” said Heller.
“I’m sick of your one-more-things!” said Bury.
Heller opened the hood’s wallet. He took a notebook and, in a blur of fast writing, took down all the particulars in it. Then he read the criminal’s name aloud:
“Torpedo Fiaccola” and added his home address and social security number.
Heller took the money he had removed from the assassin. “This is about five thousand, I should judge.” He put it in the wallet, making it bulge. “It is probably half the contract price.”
He gave the wallet to the gangster. “I would not want to be accused of taking the daily bread out of anyone’s mouth. So I am buying a contract on Mr. Bury’s life.”
Bury and the gangster looked at each other and back at Heller.
“But I don’t want it executed yet,” said Heller. “If any of this I.D. turns out to be funny or if I hear any Bury bullets going past my ears, I will phone you and you can execute the contract on him. You will be paid another five thousand cash if you then execute it.” He must have smiled at the hood. The fellow didn’t know what to think.
“Oh, I can reach you,” said Heller. “I have your mother’s address and phone number here.”
The gangster flinched. I actually don’t think Heller understood that the gangster now thought Heller was saying that if the hood didn’t comply, his mother would be executed. But the gangster, I could see, took it that way.
Bury was another matter. As Heller studied him, I could see that Mr. Bury had another trick up his sleeve.
“You have nothing to fear from me, Mr. Bury,” said Heller. “You have your papers. I will keep the deal as long as you do. So let’s leave it that way.”
Heller took the shells out of the revolvers. I freaked! He didn’t have a gun on them now!
Heller opened up the violin case and inspected the dismantled sniper rifle. Then he took its supply of shells. He gave the guns and case and briefcase to them. With a screwdriver, he got a grip on the knob shaft socket and opened the door.
With a courtly bow, he signalled they could leave.
“May we never have occasion to meet again,” said Heller.
The look Bury gave him would have disfigured a brass statue.
They left.
Heller was a fool! His grand heroics might serve in another time and place but not New York, New York, Planet Earth — Blito-P3!
He should have quietly killed them both. That would have been the tradecraft thing to do!
He had humbled one of the most influential attorneys on the planet and gotten the better of Rockecenter, a thing that man never tol
erates.
Then, just as if he had not made mortal enemies, Heller neatly put the doorknob back on, packed, made everything tidy. Then, as he put his baseball cap on the back of his head in front of the mirror, he said, “There’s nothing like FBI training to see you through.” And he laughed.
But they hadn’t taught him enough. Bury already had realized that any threat to Heller from anyone could be interpreted by Jerome Terrance Wister as coming from Bury. It left Bury with no other choice than, one way or another — if not at once, then at some convenient future time — to use much more adroit methods to eradicate Jerome Terrance Wister. Top Wall Street lawyers don’t ever really lose. They only postpone.
At his fingertips, Bury had at his command not only government agencies but whole governments. He could sic any of them on Heller. Money meant nothing to him. Very possibly, right this minute he was offering Torpedo Fiaccola three times what Heller had offered to give it another try. And Fiaccola, frantic at that foolish threat to his mother, as well as his disgrace today, would now listen to anything.
Heller really was dealing in a subject he knew too little about. And he was a lot too cocky! Spies are deadly things, like scorpions in hiding. They don’t walk out the door singing after they have set in motion the most powerful and vengeful machine on the planet — the Rockecenter power.
I sat and gloomed. I could think of no way to get that platen before Heller was killed. No wonder the life expectancy of combat engineers was only a couple of years of service. The life expectancy of anyone handling one, such as me, might even be much shorter!
And as I sat there glooming, a special messenger from Faht’s office rushed in with the day’s report from Raht and Terb. It said, “He registered at the Brewster Hotel and just checked out.” My Gods, I didn’t even get backup from my own men! Hells had no future like the one that waited for me!
PART SIXTEEN
Chapter 1
Heller couldn’t find anybody in the Brewster lobby, so he went behind the desk, put the thirty-dollar room price under the counter where it could be seen, put his Al Capone registration card on top of it and wrote himself a receipt on their invoice machine, signing it Brinks. The FBI had not taught him very well: Capone had never once robbed a Brinks armored car. I know my American history!
Working on deciphering the scribbled numbers around the lobby public phone — some of them girls, some of them pimps and some of them gays — he found a taxi company and phoned it.
After getting his baggage into the cab, he said to the German-looking driver, “I’m looking for a place to live. A better hotel than this one. Something with some class.”
With Heller noting bashed fenders of cars and darting amongst collision-fixated cars, they were soon over on Madison Avenue, roaring uptown.
At 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, the cabby dumped Heller in a driveway. Heller unloaded his baggage and offered a twenty-dollar bill. The cabby simply took the bill and drove rapidly away, though the fare had been much less. Heller was learning about New York.
He looked up. The Snob Palace Hotel soared above him. Although there were uniformed doormen and bellboys racing about, nobody took his baggage. He gathered it up and went in. A vast, glittering lobby stretched about him, almost a hangar. Sparkling but decorous light fixtures illuminated the subdued and decorous furnishings. An expensive and decorous throng eddied around him as he made his way to the Room Desk.
There were numerous clerks, all busy. Heller waited. Nobody looked up. Finally, he said to one clerk, “I’d like a room.”
“Do you have a reservation?” said the clerk. “No? Then see the assistant manager. Over there, please.”
The assistant manager was busy. He was answering a complaint on the phone in a suitably decorous voice. Something about a poodle not having been aired. Finally he looked up. He did not much care for what he saw. By a mirror that covered the back wall behind him, I could see it, too.
Here was somebody in a loud, too-small, red-checked jacket and a pair of blue-striped pants that didn’t reach his baseball shoes and who had, of all things, a red baseball cap on the back of his head. “Yes?” said the assistant manager.
Heller chipped the ice off it. “I’d like a nice room, maybe two rooms.”
“Are you with your parents?”
“No, they’re not on Earth.”
“Suites start at four hundred dollars a day and go up. I shouldn’t think you would be interested. Good day.” And he got on the phone to scold the help for not decorously airing somebody’s poodle.
I knew what was wrong. Heller was thinking in credits. A credit was worth several dollars. He picked up his baggage, walked out and walked into a cab which had just discharged a Pekingese that had been getting aired.
“I am looking for a room. I want something less expensive than they have in this place.”
The driver promptly dashed downtown, switched over to Lexington Avenue, avoided numerous smashups and dumped Heller at 21st Street. Heller offered a twenty-dollar bill. The driver was very surprised when it didn’t come out from between Heller’s fingers. He grumblingly got change and in a swift movement, they swapped monies. Heller gave him a fifty-cent tip. He was learning. Heller looked up at a ramshackle building. The canopy over the sidewalk said:
The Casa de Flop
He picked up his bags and walked in. A sodden group of winos sagged on sodden furniture. A sodden clerk slumped over a sodden desk. It was a very sodden lobby.
An odd sound hit my ears. Then I identified it. It was Heller sniffing. “Oof!” he said to nobody. “You’d think this place was run by the Apparatus!”
Code break! Code break! And unpatriotic! I made a hasty note and marked the recording strip. Nobody can accuse me of not doing my duty!
He hefted his bags, turned around and left.
Outside he stopped and looked back at the building. “You hotels can go sink yourselves! A house would cost less and be cleaner!”
It was two blocks before he could find another cab. It was sitting at the curb and Heller hailed it before it could drive off.
The driver looked like he had been up every night for the past year. He also didn’t have any space between his eyes and hairline. A Neanderthal type.
Heller loaded his baggage. He leaned forward to speak through the glass and wire New York cabbies hope will protect them from muggers.
“Do you know of a house?”
The driver turned around to look at him. He thought. He said, “Do you have any money?”
“Of course I have money,” said Heller.
“You’re awfully young.”
“Look,” said Heller, “do you know of a house or don’t you?”
The driver looked at him doubtfully but then nodded.
“All right,” said Heller, “take me there!”
They bashed their way up into the Forties and headed over toward the East River. The black, tall slab of the United Nations pointed skyward in the near distance. They were drawing into a quieter, more elegant neighborhood full of imposing, high-rise buildings.
They pulled up at the curb before one. It was a building of gleaming stone and opaque glass, a beautiful modern structure many stories high. A patch of greenery and a brief curved drive set it back slightly from the sidewalk. An elegant, decorous sign, lettered in gold on black stone, was part of the wall to the left of the imposing entrance. The sign said:
The Gracious Palms
The cab had not pulled into the drive because a squat, low, black limousine was sitting there, chauffeur at the wheel. Heller got his bags out of the cab and put them on the walk. He was fishing in his pockets for the fare.
And then a remarkable thing happened!
The cabby, who had shortly before been so dopey, stared at the limousine and front entrance. His eyes suddenly shot wide with fear!
With a screech of tires, the cabby got his hack the Hells out of there!
Without being paid!
Heller gazed after the fleeing c
ab. He put the money back in his pocket. He hefted his bags and walked toward the entrance.
The limousine had its engine running.
There was a tough-looking young man lounging outside the door to the right of it. He was dressed in a double-breasted suit and he had a hat pulled down over his eyes. He pried himself off the wall as Heller approached.
The young man’s right hand came up. Something in it!
It was a miniature walkie-talkie radio. He said something into it, eyeing Heller.
Something was going on! Something dangerous!
And Heller, the idiot, wasn’t taking alarm! He walked on in through the entrance.
The lobby was small but dignified. Iron spiral staircases went up to a balcony on the far wall. Gold elevator doors were set into the polished tan stone. Designs in gold-colored metal wandered gracefully on the walls. There were some upholstered chairs of beautiful design, in groups of two, half-hidden by lovely green plants. A long, gold-colored counter was the obvious reception place.
There was nobody in sight! Not a soul!
Heller clickety-clacked across the polished, multicolored stone terrazzo floor, going toward the counter.
A small door in the wall to the left of the counter, marked with a sign: Host, opened about six inches. There was a man’s face there. A tough one. A hand came out and beckoned silently to Heller.
Heller put down his baggage and walked over to the door. It swung open.
It was a large, ornate office. At the far end there was a carved desk. At it sat a man, small, well-dressed, black hair, narrow face. The sign on his desk said:
Vantagio Meretrici, Manager
Sitting to the desk’s right were two men, hats on, right hands out of sight. The three were all looking toward Heller.
Behind Heller the door closed.
Suddenly he was seized from behind!
His arms were pinned with a lock grip!
He was wrestled to a straight-back chair in the corner beside the door!
